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In the Winter of 1967 a Special Issue of the French Literary Review Tel Quel Was Published Devoted Entirely to the Writing of the Marquis De Sade

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In the Winter of 1967 a Special Issue of the French Literary Review Tel Quel Was Published Devoted Entirely to the Writing of the Marquis De Sade 296 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 297 In the winter of 1967 a special issue of the French literary review Tel Quel was published devoted entirely to the writing of the Marquis de Sade. 1 Bringing together the commentary of both those central to the review’s project and those with similar concerns, this publication formed one of a series of sig- nificant moments in the reception and so-called rehabilitation of Sade’s work amongst a new generation of post-Second World War writers and intellectuals. In the pages of Tel Quel one sees a confluence of theoretical and literary concerns invested in Sade’s oeuvre—as Patrick French says, Sade’s work was “the principle focus” of the review’s enquiry into “the relation of sex to writing.” 2 This investment in the figure of the writer was related to, and followed, the efforts of the publisher Jean- Jacques Pauvert, who during the 1950s and 1960s, in a direct challenge to the laws on obscenity in France, made available the author’s complete body of work. New York’s maverick pub- lishers Grove Press shortly followed suit, publishing Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, & Other Writings in English in 1965, and a series of other volumes thereafter. These publications were accompanied by extensive essays by an earlier generation of Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Benjamin Greenman French thinkers, including (amongst others) Maurice Blanchot, Formation of a Sadean Aesthetic whose essay was the first translation of his work into English. in the Work of Vito Acconci It was to the theorization of Sade’s work by this earlier genera- tion of intellectuals that both contributors to Tel Quel and the American artist Vito Acconci were responding in the late 1960s. In fact, the 1965 Grove Press publication and Blanchot’s essay in particular, a translated excerpt from his book Lautréamont et Sade, was Acconci’s primary encounter with this constella- tion of concerns in the French literary avant-garde. A decisive factor of this historical moment, and con- centrated in the project of Tel Quel, was the theorization of écriture, which entailed an expansive concept of the text, and the formation of a set of literary precedents (so-called “limit- texts”) that questioned the notion of literature and articulated a political dimension within writing itself. Craig Dworkin, in an incisive account of the literary dimension of Acconci’s work, has consistently argued that there is a fundamental kinship between the contemporary literary and philosophical concerns in France and the procedures and preoccupations of Acconci’s 1 Tel Quel, no. 28 (1967). The publication included essays by Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Hubert Damisch, and Michel Tort. 2 Patrick French, The Time of Theory: A History of “Tel Quel” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 97. 298 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 299 practice in the United States. In the latter half of the 1960s, account of Acconci’s notorious performance-installation Seedbed Acconci was an experimental writer with a growing reputation (1972), an exemplary figure of post-Minimalist de-sublimation, amongst the second wave of New York School Poets. Spurred is telling. For the duration of the performance the artist laid in on by the insight of Minimalism, he became a visual artist at a gallery underneath a raised, sloping floor. Responding to the the end of the decade, producing performances, films, installa- sound of the visitors above, he intoned erotic fantasies into a tions and what he described as photo-activities. microphone that were broadcast through speakers in the room; Although not all commentators agree or see its signifi- throughout Acconci euphemistically “produced seed” using the cance, Dworkin contends that Acconci’s art practice should visitor as a spur to his action. Dworkin’s remarks are brief but be understood as an extension of writing, rather than a shift instructive. He states that between two distinct fields of activity. This approach empha- sizes the continuity that the artist himself suggested in his [w]ith its connotations of both agricultural and comments on the development of his work, in which a pre- electronic media, “broadcast” conflates and col- occupation with the materiality of language, and in particular lapses the Latin semen (seed, from serere: to sow) of the written word on the page, provided the literal basis for and the Greek sema (sign), sema and soma (body), performative actions off the page. In broad strokes, one could microphone and phallus, the emission of the body say from this perspective that Acconci’s work supports and (semen) and the generation of its medial commu- exemplifies the accepted view that there was “a new kind of nications (semantics, semiotics). 5 textuality,” with an insistence on the possibilities of the signi- fier rather than the signified, which became common to “all What this extremely condensed statement proposes is essen- the arts” during the period under discussion; Acconci’s prac- tially a form of embodied textual production. Not solely an tice in particular literally traversed this field in its expansive interaction between artist and viewer, it elaborates a meta- movement. 3 phoric operation, an operation in language synonymous with In seeking to account for the breadth of Acconci’s pro- sexual activity. In this regard, it can be seen as comparable cedures of writing and subsequent production of visual art, to what Philippe Sollers, in his essay for the aforementioned Dworkin has employed Jacques Derrida’s contemporaneous issue of Tel Quel, described as the ultimate goal of the Sadean philosophical account of écriture, and specifically his notions of project, namely, the “perpetual movement of sex-language.” 6 the grapheme and différance. These were certainly important Dworkin therefore proposes, even without reference to authors ideas for the elaboration of a theory of writing amongst con- such as Sollers, a connection between écriture, the body and tributors to Tel Quel. And, while Dworkin acknowledges this sexuality. However, it should be noted how much of what one significance (as he remarks that those best placed to understand might expect of the concerns discussed in the pages of Tel Acconci’s work were “those Francophile intellectuals attuned Quel, a meeting point of psychoanalytic theory and structural to the écriture being theorized by Tel Quel . .”), his account linguistics, are absent: there is no unconscious, no repression, refrains from relating writing to a theory of sexuality. 4 To this no desire, no experience of limits and no jouissance. extent, what is particular to the group’s reading of Sade and At the same time, this was not the language in which what Acconci’s reputation is inextricably connected with, that Acconci saw and described his work, either. In fact, the pro- is, the use of the eroticized body as the basis for performance, found silence on matters of sexuality in the artist’s theoreti- is secondary to a particular notion of writing, albeit one that cal notes is striking, despite the fact that he theorized his does not in itself preclude a discourse on sexuality. Dworkin’s work endlessly. The conceptualization of his work, from 1969 onwards, consisted of a quasi-scientific theoretical framework 3 Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in The 60s Without Apology, eds. S. Sayers, A. Stephanson, S. Aranowitz, and F. Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 200. 5 Craig Dworkin, “Fugitive Signs,” October, no. 95 (Winter 2001): 110. 4 Craig Dworkin, introduction to Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci, 6 Philippe Sollers, “Sade in the Text,” in Writing and the Experience of Limits, ed. David Hyman ed. Craig Dworkin (London—Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), xiii. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 58. 300 French Theory and American Art Blanchot, Tel Quel and the Formation of a Sadean 301 that drew on the ideas of Kurt Lewin’s topological psychology, at no stage does she look back. Hence, despite the intensity of Erving Goffman’s sociology of interaction, and Morse Peckham’s the physical struggle, and the evident anguish and pain of the behavioral theory of art. Notably, there is no specific discourse ordeal, we are ultimately met with a refusal, as the unfolding on pleasure or sexuality, and although psychoanalytic ideas are of the performance makes abundantly clear. The work evokes not entirely absent, they were primarily understood through the profound sense that beyond force there is an unattainable Lewin’s conceptualization of dynamic models. Therefore, there reciprocity. is no programmatic erotic dimension to the work, something From the perspective of the current literature on Acconci’s one would expect in relation to Sade’s work. And, equally, an work, especially following Amelia Jones’s interpretation in economy of pleasure and pain, again another expected feature, the 1990s, this work is most likely to be understood as an inter- is replaced by a work that approximated the positivism of the rogation of masculinity and the normative force of the gender- social sciences. ing of power. From this perspective, Pryings is a particularly Nonetheless, Acconci’s work has often been discussed poignant instance in which the male subject fails to sustain his in relation to sadism. In the artist’s numerous performances will and mastery in his actions. The resistance to his volition that frequently employed the artist and an (implied) audience exposes its limits. Jones observes that the woman “repudiates or the artist and a woman (Kathy Dillon), there are notable his attempt to make her react to him and thus to confirm the moments of (sexual) aggression as well as defined positions of effectiveness .
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